ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS, APRIL 19-22--Frank Lloyd Wright designed his winter home, Taliesin West, in Arizona's Sonoran Desert to complement the environment with sharp angles and sloping roofs. The famed architect's house, shown from the rear March 20, 2001, is in a 600-acre complex about 26 miles east of Phoenix. (AP Photo/Jason Wise) less

ADVANCE FOR WEEKEND EDITIONS, APRIL 19-22--Frank Lloyd Wright designed his winter home, Taliesin West, in Arizona's Sonoran Desert to complement the environment with sharp angles and sloping roofs. The famed ... more

Photo: JASON WISE

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Montezuma Castle National Monument
Arizona Courtesy National Park Service

Montezuma Castle National Monument
Arizona Courtesy National Park Service

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Modern, ancient approaches to desert living

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2005-02-20 04:00:00 PDT Mayer, Ariz. -- I had a free airline ticket to Phoenix, but the city itself held limited allure. Instead, my girlfriend, Amy, and I got a primer on desert living in just three days touring nearby.

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's Western outpost in Scottsdale, was our first stop. To tour Taliesin West -- even more so than other Wright homes I've visited -- is to be lured into the cult of Wright. Our guide, Weiss, was an acolyte of the first order.

"He was New Age before New Age was New Age," she told us several times. "He was a visionary."

She rattled off dates (he first came to Arizona in 1937 and died there in 1959) and figures (about 22,000 drawings are in the archives), and her excitement often came in inverse relation to the importance of the remark.

"He was the first person to invent aisle lighting!" she enthused in the compound's cabaret -- an intimate, mostly subterranean room with exceptional acoustics created by its hexagonal shape.

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Wright produced the first distinctly American architecture, houses that didn't look at all like European transplants but instead grew out of the landscape. Taliesin West, with its sloped redwood beams and mortared stone walls, was meant to fit in the desert and echo the nearby McDowell Mountains.

The experience visitors often want, however, is that of living in a Wright-designed house. Taliesin gives a small taste of that feast. Our tour group of about 20 fit into Wright's long living room, and everyone sat down as though it were a big cocktail party, with custom-made chairs to spare.

Among those who came to study with Wright was Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, now 85, who has become an Arizona fixture himself. About 65 miles north of Phoenix is his ongoing experiment, Arcosanti.

Arcosanti exemplifies Soleri's arcology theory -- a blending of architecture and ecology. According to the theory, a city should develop like an organism, or an ecosystem, with symbiotic systems. The excess hot air from a planned greenhouse, for instance, will one day warm houses and offices.

If Wright's notion of living in harmony with the desert was aesthetic, Soleri's ideas are more practical. The buildings are cast concrete, which soaks up heat during the day and emits it during the cold desert nights. Arches over outdoor work spaces are designed to allow sunlight in during the winter, when the sun is low in the sky, then create shade in the summer. The whole development looks like a futuristic oasis in the middle of an unforgiving landscape.

Plans call for the village to be big enough for 5,000 someday -- though only 70 students, artists and residents live there now. (There's room for about 50 more, according to our tour guide.) They've been building it with mostly volunteer labor since 1970. At that rate, I calculated, it will be done around 3250.

Still, Soleri has his own fanatical following, and Arcosanti draws visitors with its daily tours, bakery, shop and performances in the outdoor theater.

Our arrival coincided with the final show of the 2004 season, so we arranged for dinner in the cafe and lodging in one of the 12 guest rooms. After a tour came our commune-gourmet buffet: chicken Kiev, leek casserole, borscht and salad.

There was no sleeping in the next morning at Arcosanti. The row of guest rooms was invaded by sun at dawn, and every sound reverberated off the concrete walls. The accommodations have dorm-room styling: twin beds on either side of a drafting-style desk.

The breakfast Sunday was more commune than gourmet: cold cereal and hard- boiled eggs with coffee. But it was enough to fuel us through our next stop, about 30 miles farther north: Montezuma Castle National Monument.

The Spanish were aggressive explorers but imprecise with names. Neither Montezuma nor any Aztec lived in these ancient cliff dwellings. They were built by the Sinagua Indians. A short loop steers visitors past the five-story cliff house -- think 12th century condos -- and the verdant area along Beaver Creek.

The Sinagua (Spanish for "without water") truly mastered desert living. Their rooms were tucked into a shady recess in the limestone cliff, reachable only by ladder. Their walls, as thick as 3 feet, kept rooms cool. The height provided safety from invaders or floods.

Our afternoon hike gave us a view of more modern desert-dwellers. Our route into Boynton Canyon began by paralleling the backside of a huge luxury resort near Sedona.

The 2 1/2-mile trail soon cleared the development, however, and wound deep into the box canyon, part of the Red Rock/Secret Mountain Wilderness Area. We gained only 500 feet in elevation, yet it was like going through three ecological zones -- from the mesquite trees in the sandy desert, into shady deciduous woods, and then a pine and fir forest. The canyon was pleasantly cool, even on a 95-degree day.

Our socks were pink from Sedona's red sand when we pulled off our shoes in Jerome'sConnor Hotel, about 25 miles from Sedona. I felt a bit drunk stumbling on the sloping floors of our small but charming room overlooking Main Street. Copper miners in Jerome tunneled and dynamited under their own houses, and the buildings have shifted with the earth. Doors in the hotel, built in 1898, are now cut at angles to accommodate slanting thresholds.

At the Jerome Brewery up the street, we had tasty pints of microbrews with our pizza and pasta. Jerome pulls down the shades early on Sundays, and it regains some of its ghost-town feel after the gallery-hopping and biker crowd winds back down the hill at the end of the weekend. In Jerome, it wasn't the sun but the loud downshifting of truck gears that woke us. After a filling breakfast at Reynard, we poked our heads into the few shops and galleries that were open.

We coasted back down into the Verde River Valley to Tuzigoot National Monument, another 12th century Sinagua settlement. This one, on a rise above a river marsh, was excavated by government-funded archaeologists in 1933. A small museum shows historic photos and artifacts from the dig. Shells from the Pacific and the bones of a Mexican parrot indicate how far the Indian trade routes stretched.

Standing on the roof of a reconstructed house, we could look down on the labyrinth of limestone walls, about 100 rooms that, by the early 1400s, housed more than 200 people -- at the time, the park ranger said, a big city.

Looking out to the west, we could see new developments, indistinguishable houses with tile roofs spreading out from Clarkdale. This valley is one of the fastest-growing areas of the state, the ranger said.